Push
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4.5 • 10 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A new 25th anniversary edition of the instant classic that inspired the major motion picture and Sundance Film Festival winner Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, whose power and ferocity influenced a generation of writers.
Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as she learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it truly her own for the first time.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The only way to understand how this dark and important novella became such a cultural phenomenon is to read it for yourself. Claireece “Precious” Jones is a ninth grader growing up in ’80s Harlem. She’s been enduring violence and sexual abuse from both of her parents for all her life while living in intense poverty. Precious is also functionally illiterate, but when she begins attending an alternative high school, her life starts to change. Author Sapphire does everything she can to make you see the horrors Precious endures through her young heroine’s eyes. (Be warned: her depictions of abuse are graphic.) But what’s somehow even more affecting is Precious’ growing facility with language. Since the novella is presented through Precious’ journal entries, we get to watch as her writing skills become more sophisticated—and with them, her thoughts, ideas, and hopes for herself. Push makes a profound statement about the transcendent power of words.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this much anticipated first novel, told from the point of view of an illiterate, brutalized Harlem teenager, Sapphire (American Dreams), a writer affiliated with the Nuyorican poets, charts the psychic damage of the most ghettoized of inner-city inhabitants. Obese, dark-skinned, HIV-positive, bullied by her sexually abusive mother, Clareece, Precious Jones is, at the novel's outset, pregnant for the second time with her father's child. (Precious had her first daughter at 12, named Little Mongo, "short for Mongoloid Down Sinder, which is what she is; sometimes what I feel I is. I feel so stupid sometimes. So ugly, worth nuffin.") Referred to a pilot program by an unusually solicitous principal, Precious comes under the experimental pedagogy of a lesbian miracle worker named, implausibly enough, Blue Rain. Under her angelic mentorship, Precious, who has never before experienced real nurturing, learns to voice her long suppressed feelings in a journal. As her language skills improve, she finds sustenance in writing poetry, in friendships and in support groups-one for "insect" survivors and one for HIV-positive teens. It is here that Sapphire falters, as her slim and harrowing novel, with its references to Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes and The Color Purple (a parallel the author hints at again and again), becomes a conventional, albeit dark and unresolved, allegory about redemption. The ending, composed of excerpts from the journals of Precious's classmates, lends heightened realism and a wider scope to the narrative, but also gives it a quality of incompleteness. Sapphire has created a remarkable heroine in Precious, whose first-person street talk is by turns blisteringly savvy, rawly lyrical, hilariously pig-headed and wrenchingly vulnerable. Yet that voice begs to be heard in a larger novel of more depth and complexity. 150,000 first printing; first serial to the New Yorker; audio rights to Random; foreign rights sold to England, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal and Brazil.
